If I Was Building a Twitter Client, I Would …

Saturday, August 16 2008 - , , , ,

I am building a Twitter client using Silverlight and a Twitter API service I pulled together using REST services. Its nothing fancy by any means, but it got me thinking “hey John, this would be a great addition to your Silverlight book”. So I decided to put it in my Data Services and Silverlight 2 book when I discuss REST services. Problem is that I already talk about other REST services, like Amazon, so I need to make sure I do not get carried away with the services and instead I focus on how to interact with them.

The Twitter client likely won’t encompass everything I want it to due to time constraints for the book, but it will be a good starting point. However I will continue to work on it and distribute it via something like CodePlex to whomever is interested once I get it in good shape. Eventually I will likely turn it into a WPF application so it can sit on the desktop. But I will also keep a Silverlight version so it can exist in a web page amongst other cool stuff.

So if you were looking for a Twitter client, what would it include? I definitely want a searching feature, basic tweet replies, direct messages, etc. Anything else?

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2 comment(s)

Peter Bromberg wrote on Sunday, August 17 2008

John, One of the things you'll need to consider is using an ASP.NET WCF or ASMX service to handle the calls. Anything requiring BASIC authentication is verboten in SL's HttpWebRequest - as are many other headers besides "Authorization".

John Papa wrote on Sunday, August 17 2008

Peter, you are correct. WebClient does not have the Credentials property either in SIlverlight 2. I am using a relay service via WCF to handle the communication.